Texture and Tide I

The orange band burning through the middle of this painting does a lot of work. Everything else, the violet clouds, the blue-grey mountains, the pinkish water, sits in cooler tones, so that thin strip of sunlight and its reflection stretching toward us feels much hotter than it actually is. Scott Naismith built the whole surface with a palette knife rather than a brush, dragging and pressing paint into ridges you could catch a fingernail on. The mountains on both sides are almost entirely flat slabs of colour, laid down fast and left alone.

Naismith is a Scottish painter based near Glasgow, and his subject is nearly always the same: the lochs, sea and skies of the west coast and the Hebrides, where weather changes faster than anyone can paint it. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art and has spent years working out how to handle light on water without tidying it up. This one belongs to a series where texture matters as much as the view, and the reflection in the lower half is worth a look on its own. Instead of a mirrored image, it breaks into shattered plates of grey and blue, more like ice than water, which is a slightly odd choice but keeps the bottom of the picture from going soft.